“A technological civilization is programmed by the principal that something ought to be done if it is technologically possible. If it is possible to make nuclear weapons, they must be built even if they destroy us all.” –Erich Fromm

What drives the mad chariot race forward? Abraxas is the animating demon behind technological advance. He seduces us with convenience and nifty gadgets to keep us toiling at the workbench in white smocks until such time as transhuman entities can ‘man’ their own workstations. (The Singularity is a secularized term for demonic hegemony.) He also encourages us to believe we are ‘in control of the process’ whereas Mary Shelley assured us scientific hubris is anything BUT control. We are the horses in reins.

Transhumanity is a slyly inoffensive term that masks a post-human agenda, implying some happy bridge that we all dance across on the way to godlike status. Whee! As Baudelaire said, ‘the devil’s greatest trick was convincing us he doesn’t exist’. Science has expunged Lucifer from the record, however he is very much in science. Transhumanity is contempt for humanity. Nihilism is the devil’s philosophy, an existence emptied of man.

“…society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good–by means of his conscience.”—from ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, by Garrett Hardin

By this time, the particulars of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s now-decade-old crimes have been well-documented, fully aired and even Hollywoodized. He’s served his time and continues to pay his debt to society in the form of sizeable restitution.

That said, not everyone feels obliged to extend Abramoff forgiveness—an altogether personal and defensible position. (At this point, I reserve the weight of my derision for the system itself which, on the day of Abramoff’s sentencing, barely slowed to slap its own wrist. The usual legalized bribery meet ‘n greets in the form of Congressional fundraising events proceeded that very evening.) Suffice to say, Jack Abramoff remains a polarizing figure in many quarters.

We won’t delve statistical analyses and methods here except to say the study was peer-reviewed. The key finding was that the 90th percentile of the population (by income) was fifteen times more likely to have its preferences reflected in policy decisions than was the 50th percentile. This led Gilens and Page to conclude that average citizens have “little or no independent influence” on the policy-making process. In short, we inhabit an oligarchy with only the barest democratic façade.

The good news is that 1) we now have an empirical protocol for quantifying relative influence as a function of socio-economic status and 2) we possess rigorous academic confirmation of a reality which registers a big ‘duh’ with the average Joe. As this is not a televised interview, I’ll note for the reading audience your jaw didn’t exactly hit the ground either. Nonetheless I’ll ask you anyway. Are you surprised at just how lop-sided and anti-populist these findings are?

Jack: I am not surprised at all. In almost every human endeavor, the elite have more impact and influence than the average person. Political influence in the United States can be acquired either by dedicating time and effort to making your voice matter, or by buying that influence and impact. Those who are more wealthy have more discretionary income and those among that group that are politically inclined are more able to expend those resources than the rest of us. Similarly, those activists who have politics in their blood have more time than the rest of us to spend impacting policy.

Norm: I should note that the academic community was caught off-guard for the most part by these findings as they suggest a heretofore-aberrant form of democracy that travels under the moniker ‘biased pluralism’. Perhaps you could recommend to the American Political Science Association a good lobbyist to get democracy back on track.

Jack: I’ll see if I can find them someone [laughs].

Norm: You’re on record as not being a big fan of publically funded elections. Could you elaborate on your misgivings with this approach?

Jack: The money in the system that I believe needs to be removed is the money spent by people seeking some special favor or interest from the government, and their advocates, otherwise known as lobbyists. My belief is that, if you want something for yourself from a public servant and give that public servant money or something of value, then you have, in essence, bribed that public servant.

So, if I could wave a magic wand and change the campaign finance system, I would eliminate the ability of lobbyists and their clients to give any money at all within the federal system, including Super PACs. If someone wants to give money for any other reason, including admiration of a candidate’s positions on issues other than those that impact that donor’s pocketbook, I have no problem with their giving whatever they want.

The truth is, of course, that virtually all big dollar donors on the Left and Right have a quid pro quo in mind. Removing them from the system would dramatically reduce the amount of money in politics. I favor this over publically funded elections for several reasons. Primarily, I don’t believe public funding has any chance of becoming law. The Right is against it – as they generally oppose expansion of government, and since it would, at some level, put the decisions to fund campaigns in a public official’s hands. That is anathema to conservatives.

Even if this could somehow become the law, I would be opposed because the folks most likely to benefit from public funding would be the cadre of political consultants. You would find hundreds of shadow candidacies springing up, as consultants and lobbyists rushed to rake in the new bucks.

Finally, I am personally opposed to forcing someone to fund ideas that they find abhorrent. Of course, one could argue that most people fund things they find abhorrent currently, but that does not make it right.

Norm: In ‘Capitol Punishment’, you zero in on the profound moral confusion plaguing the system: “Contributions from parties with an interest in legislation are really nothing but bribes. Sure, it’s legal for the most part. Sure, everyone in Washington does it. Sure, it’s the way the system works. It’s one of Washington’s dirty little secrets–but it’s bribery just the same”.

Forgive me, but this seems more like a dirty big secret whose roots may extend beyond the system, springing from the culture itself. In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko famously asserts ‘greed is good’ in true upside-down fashion. Have we lost touch with what constitutes the unconscionable?

Jack: If bribery was the only sinful behavior our society embraced, we would be living in a very different world. The hallmark of modern society is our ability to convince ourselves that aberrant behavior is normal and acceptable. We see this is almost every facet of our lives. With bribery, the sophistry is fascinating. Because our politicians are not accepting bags full of cash, they somehow feel they are not being bribed. Worse, if most members of Congress were compelled to take a lie detector test querying whether they thought they were being influenced by the money they receive, they and their denials would pass with flying colors.

Norm: In your CSPAN interview, you expressed surprise at how unconcerned our elected officials appear to be at the abysmal 11% approval rating of Congress as an institution. Might it be because the incumbency reelection rate is 96%? (Source of both stats: Politifact.com, November 11, 2014). How can we send the institution of Congress packing when we’re so enamored of our own local hero?

Jack: I think the problem is that most people view politics much like they view the weather: it stinks, but there’s not much we can do about it. People have come to the conclusion that the nation is too big and the forces that impact our policies too powerful that their voices are now too small to matter. They are wrong of course. But that depressing attitude has now become the default reaction that permits the powerful to run roughshod over our lives. The only way people can push back, they feel, is polling negatively against Congress as an institution. It’s very sad, especially since it doesn’t have to be like this.

Norm: You suggest a radical approach for separating power from money. HLOGA’s cooling-off periods (between public and private sector employment) are, in your opinion, simply not enough. Rather, Congress and their staffs should be precluded forever from entering the lobbying business. Such patrician forbearance seems more apropos to Plato’s Republic than the Land of the Wagging Styrofoam Index Finger. So I must ask, respectfully, are you pulling our index fingers? Everyone knows philosopher-kings never clinch the nomination.

Jack: Could it be achieved? Of course. Will it be achieved? Probably not because there is no well-funded movement to make it a reality. In our nation, things don’t just happen. They happen because smart, powerful and motivated people push them. I have been pushing a political plan to make some of the changes that are needed, but that plan requires funding to fight the battle in Washington.

Most of the people who dedicate resources to politics are terrified by the proposals we have presented, so they are not going to help. There are very few who have resources and are willing to spend them to change the system. Until there are resources, there won’t be change, sadly. To change this playing field, we first have to take control of it.

Norm: Would you care to guestimate what percentage of Congress endures the indignities of public office for the chance to spin through the revolving door into the highly lucrative influence game at some later point or is the Senate gym just that darned well-appointed?

Jack: It’s hard to estimate that percentage, but it’s far higher than it should be. When I was lobbying, it seemed like 90%, but now I’m not sure. One of the problems for future lobbyists – otherwise known as Congressmen – is that there are so many of them already out there lobbying. Since most Congressmen are used to pampered treatment and consider business development unsavory, many are not good business generators. Without the business, the lobbying jobs are more difficult to get. Maybe they should run training seminars for Congressmen to teach them how to get business and otherwise prepare for their next career. I’m kidding of course!

Norm: Black humor is allowed. I understand you observe a strict Orthodox kosher diet. Hopefully my analogy’s not too unpalatable. But let’s say someone enters my hamburger joint whereupon I suggest they try my new jumbo burger in lieu of the anemic single-patty burger they typically order. The customer agrees. I’ve successfully ‘peddled them upstream’ to a higher price and higher calories. Have I exerted undue influence or merely practiced good salesmanship? What was Willy Loman but a door-to-door lobbyist?

Jack: Of course we are all salesmen at some level. A kid convincing her parents to let her use their car; a spouse convincing her mate that her parents need to feel welcome over the weekend; an employee seeking a raise from a boss. We are all constantly selling and selling is lobbying

Norm: Ninety years ago, Edward Bernays’ CrystallizingPublic Opinion explored techniques for compelling Americans to buy loads of stuff which invariably ended up stacked in their garages. Indeed without two-car garages the economy might have stalled decades ago. There seems to be something quintessentially American, if not downright patriotic, about buying and selling—an activity which you equate to lobbying. Shop influence ‘til you drop?

Jack: It’s not just an American phenomenon. It’s human nature. The reason lobbying is seen as American is because we enshrined the right to lobby –petitioning our government– in our founding charter. Most other nations had periods where petitioning their sovereign resulted in beheadings. In America, just as eventually it became nearly impossible to succeed at a criminal or civil court proceeding without the assistance of an attorney, petitioning the government became difficult without the services of a lobbyist. Like attorneys in court, lobbyists know the rules of procedure and the deciders better than the average person. In America, assisting people petitioning the government because an industry called lobbying, but not just in America. Europeans posit the delusion that they don’t have lobbyists, that no one in their nations can come in from the outside and influence their public servants. It’s absurd and untrue.

Norm: Speaking of free markets, I think a lot of small government folks would cheer your observation that lobbying is more about defense than offense, that is, getting the government off a client’s back as opposed to winning them an unfair advantage.

Jack: First, I believe that most lobbying is good lobbying. I define good lobbying as lobbying where the lobbyist does not use money to create an unleveled playing field. Bad lobbying is a small percentage of the lobbying at a federal level. Most lobbyists in Washington don’t have the money to play the game in a pernicious way. Thus, they are left fashioning their petitions based on the merits of their arguments, as it should be. As for offense or defense, because of entropy it’s generally easier to destroy than build. In the lobbying context, stopping something from happening is much easier than making it happen, mainly because there are usually ten ways to stop something for every one way of getting it done.

Norm: Resuming the marketplace theme, I’m a baker. I get up at 5 am, ply my wares and drop into bed exhausted at 9 pm. Lacking the time and energy frankly to ‘petition the Government for a redress of my grievances’, I form a Bakers Association with my fellow merchants. We hire an agent to press our professional (read: special) interests on Capitol Hill. This agent then proceeds to lay awake at night imagining—if not even contriving—our industrial-grade grievances.

But hang on. Since when did the commons become little more than a big piñata to be swung at by a hundred self-interested rolling-pins? Why is it not enough simply to be an American? If everyone re-baselined back to unleveraged citizenry instead of hiring seditious agents to obtain a leg up, would we not have something more akin to majoritarian pluralism?

Jack: We could all be ‘simply Americans’, without anyone needing to protect our interests, if the government was not involved in every aspect of our lives, making decisions that impact our livelihoods and lives. Also, we could all be ‘simply Americans’ if everyone agreed to do it. We don’t live in such a society. We live among human beings, not angels. Some of us are going to be aggressive and use any means we can to get what we want, usually at someone else’s expense.

I write in my book about a fictional picture-frame-making company suddenly confronted with legislation that would put it out of business. After presenting the narrative, I ask whether the business should just ignore the new law and fold up or try to lobby to protect itself. It’s not the business-owner’s fault a new law is on its way to destroy his enterprise. Therefore, how can he be blamed for hiring a lobbyist?

Moreover, I ask, which lobbyist would serve his interests best? The lobbyist who is an expert in picture frames, or the lobbyist who plays golf each week with the Senator coming after their industry? The problem is not the picture frame company. Nor is it the lobbyist. The problem is the Senator, not to mention a government so gargantuan and overextended that there is no shortage of work for the tens of thousands of lobbyists traversing the byways of Washington DC.

Norm: Under majoritarian pluralism isn’t influence always ‘undue’ as the former more effectively averts a tragedy of the commons scenario?

Jack: Influence is a tool, like cash or a gun. It can be used for good or for evil. We don’t live in a society so simple that the removal of lobbyists will give birth to heaven on earth. Lobbyists are a symptom of the problem of too much government. Of course, half the nation believes there’s not enough government. This lack of cohesion enables the lobbyists to find plenty to do.

Norm: It’s fascinating how this debate invariably circles back on ideology. Is there an unexploited Tea Party issue lurking in here somewhere?

Jack: Absolutely. More government means more lobbyists. Limited government means less. The ideological implications are undeniable.

Norm: In the wake of the Obama Administration’s 2009 Executive Order 13490 which precluded lobbyists from the Administration while unleashing a de-registration trend, opinions differ on just how material this unregistered phenomenon became.

Jack: First, let me mention that, while as a lobbyist, I disdained the work that Craig Holman and Public Citizen did, now that I am reformed, I realize Craig and his colleagues are real heroes. They are one of the only groups that has any real impact in this space. Craig is not only a great guy, he’s also one of the most effective lobbyists I know – and I mean that as a compliment!

But yes, I think lobbying is far too off-balance sheet. Even the act that regulates the lobbying industry –the LDA –and the changes provided in HLOGA still allow people who are lobbying to legally avoid registration. That’s how former US Senator Tom Daschle was able for so long to lobby and not register. That’s how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was able to proclaim with a straight face that he wasn’t a lobbyist, when he was lobbying Congress on the Health Care Act—as an historian! Most of the work done for clients is not actual lobbying. It’s strategizing, preparing, researching, etc.

As for the Obama rules prohibiting lobbyists from entering his Administration, I have a few thoughts. I was against this, because if you are trying to put together a talented group of public servants, you cannot exclude lobbyists, since they are often far more knowledgeable about issues than are the public servants. My approach would be that, once you enter the Administration, you can’t return to the lobbying world.

Norm: So, a one-way, one-time revolving door? And yes, agreed. Craig Holman is a true warrior for the undivided public interest.

Jack: Exactly. That would enable those who are talented to enter and really serve the public. Those who want to enter the government to burnish their lobbying credentials – so they can charge more when they exit – would be precluded. This would only work with forced recusal from any matter that you lobbied on previously.

Also, you would have to outlaw huge payments that companies make to their employees before they enter the government – an advanced bribe. This was the case with the current Secretary of Treasury, Jacob Lew, who had a provision in his Citibank contract that he was due a mammoth bonus should he leave for a highly placed government job. The only thing more aggravating than that abuse was how those in the media who otherwise are concerned with corruption ignored this one for fear of offending Obama and their friends on the Left.

Norm: There’s another untagged carp in the lake, the unlobbyist who isn’t even a deregistered or former lobbyist, but rather a single-shingle wannabe in a cheap suit working an undisclosed business development contract. Of the tin men in his midst, veteran lobbyist Howard Marlowe recently had this to say:

“We in the lobbyist profession register, and the public and media can at least find out who we work for, what the issues are that we’re hired to work on, and what we’re getting paid.”— Howard Marlowe, 35-year Washington lobbyist, Bloomberg, April 3, 2014

Extending the analogy, let’s say this old guy with a cane bamboozles people into thinking he’s a retired granddad with loads of spare time and an unerring sense of civic duty—except he invariably has sales literature stapled to the back of his grandfatherly appeals.

HLOGA seems to impute ethics transgressions onto clients and Congressmen, and not just to the unlobbyist who sucks them in. What I’m asking is, are Congressmen obligated to vet and toss bogus lobbyists out on their ears for flogging thinly disguised (and implicitly undisclosed) economic interests?

Jack: I am uncertain whether there is a legal obligation for Congress and their staff to check the registration of lobbyists. Frankly, we need a new law that requires registration as soon as someone makes even one lobbying contact for pay. The requirements for registration in the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) are far more explicit than for LDA.

Norm: Rather than chase the high-profile Senators and Congressmen whom you found to be rather lazy and self-absorbed, you wooed the hard-working staffers instead who remain, let’s face it, the nuts and bolts of legislative production. This afforded you a powerfully incentivized ‘Trojan Horse’ workforce until such time as they came to work for you directly. Is it fair to say you essentially turbocharged the revolving door back in the day?

Jack: Yes that’s fair to say. You see, the insiders’ class has an unparalleled ability to move seamlessly from government to the lobbying world. These folks know all the players from the time they were in government, and, believe me, they get their calls returned. They are better able to get favors granted than outsiders and have every advantage possible. Stopping the revolving door would be devastating to the insider lobbyists and would do a lot to level the playing field.

Norm: You suggest smart lobbyists quickly figure out the latest reforms and devise techniques to get around them. Are we dealing with a whack-a-mole dynamic, that is, any reform bill can at best be effective for a few years after which fresh reforms become necessary?

Jack: There is never going to be a perfect law in this arena, because there are legitimate concerns that are opposed and have to be considered. Free speech is at odds with undue influence here. We can’t destroy our rights to free speech, but we must deal with undue influence. So, every remedy will likely need updating and adjustment as it is implemented. That’s okay. We live in a society of adjustment. Just take a look at our tech advances. We are constantly readjusting.

Norm: As you brought up technology, there’s much talk of traditional lobbying moving to a more technology-driven and social-media-based model. What effect do you see technology having on the future of lobbying in America?

Jack: Until and unless this system is reformed dramatically, while there will be a role for social media and technology enhancing the lobbying, it won’t change the paradigm that powerful insiders will control the playing field. They will control the social media and tech role in politics as well. Social media and tech are tools, every bit as much as polling and phone banking are tools. The tools will change, but the powerful will stay in power, until there is systemic change.

Norm: F. Scott Fitzgerald would be offended Jack if I didn’t press you a bit on how your second act is faring. Hopefully you have good news and fresh initiatives to report.

Jack: Norm, I’m just trying to do my best on the playing field I’m on today. I am doing what I can to speak about these important issues and to encourage citizen action, but I am limited in my ability to make things happen because I am not a man of resources these days. That’s okay, though. One of the biggest lessons I had to learn through my scandal was that it’s all right to lose. In the old days, I never lost and wouldn’t even consider losing as acceptable. That is an arrogance at odds with my faith and being a good citizen, but in those days, it didn’t matter to me. Today, I realize that I might lose, including on this issue. I hope we can do something, but if not, I am working hard on saying: ‘It’s okay’.

Norm: Thank you Jack. It’s been a pleasure. I wish you all the luck in your future endeavors.

(This appeared previously in Witness magazine a few moons back. For those just joining this circus, I’ll be kicking up BLAST from PAST blog entries just to gather all my loose change floating around out there. My Dad used to make us spell this on long car rides. Such was the price of driving south to Marineland. It’s since been superseded by longer words such as, oh, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which you really don’t want to be catching as it’s a bitch to explain around the water cooler.)

ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM

“Properly, opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England, but popularly cited as an example of a long word.” – Oxford English Dictionary

To define this word on record-breaking length
makes of fixes -pre and suf- the stuff of strength.
Might this word, in short, be rooted in a mission
of uprooting (short of length) true definition?

Anti-dis? It’s clear some cagey cleric-scribe,
bent on dictionary fame through diatribe,
chose a perfectly benign church-state dispute
to exceed both he and it in ill-repute.
Let’s establish, sitting down, a standing rule:
not to stand prosthetic words on gimpy stools.
Too much infrastructure, at the cost of grace,
is a shortfall words alone are loath to trace.

Author’s Note: This poem would not have been possible without the renowned 19th century dispute involving the Church of England and the British government. Of course, this church/state tension continues into the present day, and probably will always be with us.

(This essay appeared in 2008 in Eclectica and only becomes more apt with time, sadly enough.)

“My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art.”—Picasso, on Guernica

Picasso was asked repeatedly to explain the meaning behind his paintings, as though the paintings themselves were perfunctory blueprints to be rifled for their precious contents. But why attempt a canvas when an arcane treatise will do? Picasso addressed this question often, unleashing varying degrees of scorn on those with the temerity to ask for helpful captions (to which I should add—with no small amount of irony—pardon the helpful captions above.) Who could blame him? When people queried him for what he really meant, were they not asking him in effect to abandon the act of painting and become a tour-guide instead? Robert Frost’s famous retort comes to mind when asked to deconstruct his art into more digestible talking points: “Would you have me say it in more or less-adequate words?” However, art is not a straw man. While perhaps helpful to us in our daily lives—for example as a way-station for interpretive reflection—it has its own reality to uphold. Moreover, the artist’s recourse to imagery is a pre-reflective phenomenon, not an explicit stratagem. The latter would suggest propaganda more than art.

Subservient minds, when they petition the artist for interpretive cues, are really seeking the apt permissioning. Their own discerning powers too atrophied, perhaps too cowed, to attempt an unassisted apprehension of the art, they want to be told what is meant by the bull, the horse, the light, the arm, the baby—beyond of course what their eyes tell them they see: a bull, a horse, a light, an arm and a baby.

But irony of ironies, an artist’s interrogation by an audience eager for instruction is precisely the soil within which fascism takes root. Tell us what to feel, oh Aesthetic Leader. Thus Picasso, in fulfilling his prophetic obligations, encountered the unthinkingness that Hannah Arendt identifies in her 1952 landmark book The Origins of Totalitarianism as the ingredient essential to all totalitarian societies. This is a circuitous way of saying Picasso’s warnings fell on ears already deaf to prophetic remonstrance. There is a tragicomic element here as the mine-shaft canary, the artist, expires magnificently, only to be trampled beneath the feet of oblivious miners.

Guernica is rich with the political symbols of its day. Indeed, the political context of the piece served only to amplify the popular clamor for bite-sized meaning. It should be said that no work of art is immune to a parochial component. To the extent Picasso’s personal motives ever really mattered, they provoke at this late juncture little more than a prurient or biographical curiosity. The task of the wakeful is to universalize the artist’s particularities, to drag his art through time where, if it is a truly enduring work, it will speak to us. Thus as time goes by, the artist’s personal narrative becomes even less relevant. As for that odious formulation, the sanctioned interpretation, art prefers to collapse like a roof on all heads, leaving everyone to gasp for his or her own breath. Interpretation is an internal war steeped in gnostic relevance, an inward-out emanation, not a top-down command structure. What precedes and follows then are the fruits of my own struggle, lashed by necessity to a time and place other than Picasso’s. How can it be otherwise?

Guernica’s historical particularities still bear a contemporary relevance. In this sense, its universality has yet to be tested. (In fairness, the work is barely seventy years old.) Certainly the conflagration that engulfs the entire canvas (Orwell’s perma-war) has not ceded any ground. The military milieu continues an inexorable march that, arguably, has suffered few interruptions since the Spanish Civil War, which, after all was the precursor to World War II, which after all was the genesis of the military industrial complex, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction—or is it mass economic corruption? Since then the unspoken casus belli has been an almost tautological predisposition to war. To be sure, having Johnny perennially dodge bullets keeps Johnny a malleable boy. War has the further advantage of emptying the shelves of bullets, necessitating the manufacture of ever-more deadly ones thanks to well-financed R&D efforts. Much like 1984’s duteous, shifting alliances between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, the villains are changed to confuse the innocent. As we’ve seen of late, the identity of the enemy is often a troubling, second-order detail for which the powers-that-be tire of being questioned. One wonders, will they ever allow themselves to be trapped by such exactitudes again? Terror is a far more durable opponent, as it lacks a fixed address and cannot offer a definitive surrender. But for those who still prefer their wars served up with nation-states, the war drums are signaling Iran as the next deadly front. Guernica renews itself with renewed urgency. Alas, nothing has changed that would compel a fundamental altering of the canvas.

At the onset of permanent war footing, Guernica announces the “honest terror” of the modern age (Lorca’s 1934 term), wherein people are driven to two wrong-directed and unthinkingly reactive modes: 1) (backwards) flights to the past and 2) (heavenwards) petitioning a godless sky. Of course these retro-modes represent futurist visions in the most superficial sense as they claim the future for the purpose only of resurrecting an idealized past.

The message drips with nihilistic despair. If war is our lot, then the future hardly warrants a mention. Indeed, one of the more striking aspects of Guernica is the utter absence of progress. The future is in full recoil from itself. Nothing is moving forward. No one, not man, woman, nor beast is even facing forward. When the present moment is compelled to mimic a past that can never be revisited, it becomes an inauthentic present, a toxic nostalgia. Picasso’s Guernica figures are displaying, either in their heavenward beseeching of an absented god or in their attempt to light a path back to the future (the Enlightenment in retreat), a desire to, in Arendt’s words “…escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future.” In his recent poem Guernica, Yusef Komunyakaa echoes this sense of time-collapse: “All the years/of exile bowed to him, & then time’s ashes/drew past & present future perfect together.”

This amnesia project is as immense as it is hopelessly escapist. The petitioning of an answerable god, particularly in its more fundamentalist permutations, must first strive to forget the indelible legacies of such giants as Nietzsche and Heidegger, just as a time-battered creationism must ignore unassailable scientific landmarks: Darwinism, the fossil record, the DNA, Dawkin’s selfish gene and modern physic’s fourteen-billion-light-year-old universe.

The past is lost except in weird parody. The only valid strategy is to exist authentically in the present, no matter how terrifying that present may be. One wonders what Picasso was intuiting in our future that such a wholesale retreat ensues. Auschwitz would follow, as would the killing fields of Cambodia, as would the ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia, as would the tribal genocide in Rwanda. One shudders to think these could be mere preludes to something more terrible still.

We can blame Nazi Germany for unleashing a war of symbols in Guernica. As Russell Martin suggests in his book Picasso’s War, the Luftwaffe’s attack on the town represented “the first time in modern warfare that a target had been destroyed solely for symbolic reasons.” So Picasso is merely moving the metaphors forward. In fact his explicit symbols symbolize the flagging symbols of culture. That’s right. The symbols are, in one sense, symbolic of symbological disarray, that is, cultural inarticulateness. Culture has too often been exposed as serviceable affectation in the face of the totalitarian onslaught; flotsam and jetsam—a bull here, a sword there—being washed downstream in a powerful current of nihilistic oblivion. In a recent essay (A New Literacy,” The Kenyon Review, 24:1, Winter 2007, 10-24) George Steiner noted the utter failure of culture to avert the Holocaust, indeed to coexist alongside it:

“Twentieth-century barbarism sprang from within the heartland of Europe culture, from the very center of the philosophic, aesthetic, and classical education. The death camps were not built in the Gobi Desert. And when barbarism challenged, the humanities, the arts, philosophic thought proved not only largely impotent but often collaborative with despotism and massacre. The actual designation literae humaniores rang hollow.”

Picasso in Guernica is depicting the holocaust that befalls culture at the hands of totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism, two forces that are often in league with one another. Would it surprise Picasso that the early years of the 21st century have been dominated by the reactionary wings of the resurgent, millennia-old Abrahamic faiths? Guernica tells us the future lies in a deep yearning for the past. What awaits us? Only time will tell.

In his February 18 essay appearing in The Guardian, ‘How I Became an Erratic Marxist’, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis cites his intermittent mentor, Karl Marx:

“If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!”

This smugly circular quote exposing capital’s counter-intuitive enslavement to labor is taken from the 1847 essay “Wage Labour and Capital”, a twenty-year precursor and prefiguring of Das Capital; it speaks to the awkward and venerable slow-dance between Labor and Capital, specifically the latter’s unswerving determination to exploit surplus value until it ends in the annihilation of all parties.

One wants to say, ‘silly communist, no capitalist is that stupid as to denude the market of consumers by annihilating them at their workstations. What’s a consumer after all but a worker on his day off?’ And indeed most factory owners are no doubt singular and rational actors. However, being left to oneself makes a vacuum not a market as historical processes enjoy expressing themselves in aggregates. The macroeconomics of unimpeded capitalism betrays all the collective wisdom of a bovine stampede. So yes, capitalism is that self-destructive. Nonetheless we’ve devised remedies to help shave the wrenching peaks and valleys. Take for instance the swimmingly successful ZIRP monetary policy or Paul Krugman’s favorite cardiovascular exercise, Keynesian string-pushing. Moving on.

Soon, we will be stared in the face by the ultimate Marxian annihilator (of Hollywood Terminator complexion and proportion), a game-changing machine that promises to obliterate the age-old division between Labor and Capital. May we survive the healing of the breach, though it’s not clear how exactly. This machine will arrive courtesy of transhumanism which, if its proponents are to be believed, will combine the best of Man and Machine (sure sounds like the end of Man to me.) Whether this is a marriage made in heaven or at the end of a shotgun depends on which man or woman you happen to ask.

What the transhumanists are implying, in not nearly enough words, (and absent human referenda) is that the central crisis of capitalism, overproduction, will be mitigated in the final analysis, not by socialized amelioration of the subsistence wage, but by the elimination of wages, which is to say, by the elimination of labor itself. By now any worker bee worth his pollen should be abuzz with anxiety.

Like the bridge species preceding us (the existentially amphibious lungfish) Man is poised to pass the baton to a precocious bucket of sentient bolts, after which the former will duteously wither away. What, they haven’t spelled out the withering away part to you? Shame on those breathless transhumanist cheerleaders. Obsolescence and maladaptation are hallmarks of the evolutionary record. We could ask a Dodo bird. But that’s sort of the point. There are no longer any Dodo birds to ask.

Our incipient witherings are encountered daily on the telephone. In recent months, who hasn’t found themselves questioning whether the voice on the other end is man or machine? Sometimes it’s a man resembling a machine. Other times it’s a cleverly solicitous oncoming locomotive headed for the Keatsian soul. Please don’t attempt this at home, but I’ve devised my own Turing Test, saying things like ‘man, your wife’s a real hottie’ just to test my phone partner’s reaction. If I’m greeted with a chaste and polite ‘thank you, could you repeat that request please’, I know I’m the sole monkey over a barrel.

The sudden bumper crop of sociopaths is an evolutionary vanguard set out to emulate machine-implacability. Prospective employers of the future will use the Reverse Turing Test to ensure our compatibility with digital colleagues (‘cause you wouldn’t want to offend an overly sensitive microprocessor.) Soul slows the work-line. Empathy is gunk between the wheels. The blithest de-humanizees in our midst are converging, with Darwinian purposefulness, on their tin-can overlords in order to win for themselves a brief stay of euthanasia. The most soulful in our midst revolt at this whole prospect and, one way or another, beg off. We’ve been losing a lot of free spirits lately.

Heidegger was among the first to express a paranoia that’s since become the dystopian staple of books and movies. Technology is an enabling, up-close assassin that only feigns service to Man, the better to take our measure and cement our fatal dependency. It’s really its own weird thing whose demon is Azazel, sidling up to us on the way to certain defeat in a final epic battle. That traitor in our midst, transhumanist Hugo de Garis, has admitted as much. Is anybody still inviting him to weekend cook-outs?

“I believe that humanity will split into two major ideological camps, one in favor of building artilects (the “Cosmists”) and those opposed (the “Terrans”). I believe that the ideological disagreements between these two groups on this issue will be so strong, that a major “artilect” war, killing billions of people, will be almost inevitable before the end of the 21st century.”

Who’s kidding whom? Technology’s barely concealed telos has always lain beyond us, in the post-human (the term ‘transhuman’ is both disingenuous gloss and euphemistic misdirection). Of course technology needed us—we, this great masochistic army of Sorcerer’s Apprentices—to attain its promontory. Unfailingly solicitous, it worked hard at bestowing upon us what Jack Nicholson’s Joker called a bevy of wonderful toys, mechanized entreaties that curried to an ancient line of character defects: (laziness) efficiency; (sloth) leisure; (avarice) productivity, (greed/pride) prosperity. On occasion, some bright Isaiah would point out technology’s troubling shadow-forms: acid rain, greenhouse gases. Invariably the coddled masses, drunk on their need for speed, would steer recalcitrant seers back to 0-50 mph in six seconds. The wind in our hair was pure seduction.

De Garis reminds us how, though we marvel at the aerodynamic miracle of mosquitos and that their feats still resist replication in the human laboratory, we routinely swat them from our arms nonetheless. Should we expect some sentimental forbearance from the coming Artilects simply because they borrowed our shoulders, as we, in our turn, stood on the striving gills of daredevil fish? It risks chauvinism, but we are a singularly remarkable species. Yet should our aggravation (or superfluity) factor grow to exceed our ability to elicit awe, creaturely fear or banal Chia Pet sentimentality in our clever little Frankensteins-to-come, who’s to say the swatter won’t be turned against us?

So we are perilously beyond quaint Marxian-isms such as equitable allocations of surplus value between human classes. Oh the humanity! Airborne drones will monitor billions of aimless human drones for a while. Yet the Panopticon is almost certainly pondering a post-surveillance phase for all this surplus labor. Anyone for Soylent Green?

Protean deflationary forces have been loosed all across the globe signaling a marked and profound disinterest in labor at any price. The capital-intensive means of production in this information age aren’t very intensive anymore. Industries can be replicated on desktops. Of course we’ve been instructed to cheer these productivity gains while refraining from the obvious question: if labor’s services are no longer required, even at the subsistence wage, then surely the non-existence wage lies dead ahead.

Labor is poking up like a sore thumb. Whether the whack comes through benign or malign neglect remains to be seen. However it’s not a stretch to envision neo-feudalistic city-states with Hobbsian badlands lurking just beyond patrician moats for the ‘extraneous’ 95% of the planet. Just ask Morgan Stanley’s Jamie Dimon. A canny algorithm is worth a hundred factories of sweating bodies. Math never sleeps. Even better, it requires no bathroom breaks.

We’re not in the grip of a cyclical downturn, nor even a secular collapse. We are converging on the cessation of mass economic activity as generations have known it. All that jostling inter-human, auction-value and price signaling stuff is being curtailed. Varoufakis has noted the extraordinary nature of the predicament too: “Europe’s current posture poses a threat to civilisation as we know it.” So great is his concern in fact that he’s abandoning Marxist leanings of a lifetime just to help hold the continent together.

Transhumanism’s heralded Era of Endless Bounty and Leisure (a wonderful entreaty worthy of bumper sticker memorialization) will not be broadly shared. The hyper-exceptionalist predilections of the elite simply won’t allow such magnanimity, even it were technically and economically feasible. Next year, the top 1% will own more than 50% of the world’s wealth. This wealth will never trickle back down. Rather it will evaporate, relinquishing its use-value to become little more than a gilded invitation to access some gated enclave on Earth. Wealth was but an interim ladder, a scorekeeping unit of measure to be retracted up the wall of the City-State at the worst possible moment. We badlanders will be left to make do in the world beyond Leviathan’s gates.

I have a new eBook out from Eye Am Eye books (green cover, left) entitled ‘East-West Dialectics, Currency Resets and the Convergent Power of One’ ($2.99). The subject matter is topical, urgent and pursues avenues I’ve not seen discussed elsewhere. It’s on the following e-retail shelves. I’ll plug in links as more outlets appear:

I myself do not have a Kindle or any eBook device. However I find the ePub reads well in the freely downloadable Adobe Digital Editions which you can get here in Mac or Windows
versions.

A $5.50 paperback version is out from Giant Steps Press (white cover, below). Given the size (almost 22,000 words) and after talking to a few bloggers, I figured book form would serve best. As is apparent from the prices, I’m just trying to get it out there. It’s HERE on Createspace and I will update this blog entry with a link when it reaches the Amazon bookshelf.

I also urge folks to check out the new combined service offerings of Eye Am Eye and Giant Steps Press for cradle-to-grave book offerings, including promotion and video. That can be found HERE.

Christine Lagarde declined to appear on camera as did the BIS. Apparently, the Greece debacle has their schedules in a kerfuffle. Maybe they can share some herring bones after the revolution. Across the mortal coil’s sublime divide, shout-outs to Orwell, Huxley, Ferdinand Lundberg and Hegel, hardly in that order.

There’s a lot of talk out there about ‘false’ and ‘East-West’ dialectics and where Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China fit within Brzezinski’sGrand Upended Chessboard. So I brush (bruise?) a little bit of Hegel and a teaspoonful of Marx. More important, until we understand the transcendent role International Capital plays, the horizontal maneuverings of nation-state and empire players are largely indecipherable. The truth is we’re operating within a tripartite class system reminiscent of Ferdinand Lundberg’s Finpols, Pubpols and We, the Underlings taking up the butt-end of the Dancing Vaudeville Horse.

eBook Cover design: Paul Toth of Eye Am Eye. Thanks go to Paul for accepting the book in his maiden venture Eye Am Eye. I’m flattered to be one of the first eBooks out in the catalog.

There’s also a music video in there (eBook only) of a Depression-era song I penned with Reverbnation’s #1 Canada’s blues singer-songwriter Lonnie Glass. So, the whole enchilada and a poem or two just to drive the austerity home to the streets where many of us will be taking up post-reset residency.

I hope folks pick up a copy. I put a decent amount of time and thought into it and I wouldn’t belabor the electrons if I felt it didn’t advance the conversation.

Here is the Preface:

This three-part series attempts a vaguely Christian read of the so-called ‘East-West dialectic’ first by exploring the overarching engine of historical advance (usury and debt-money creation); then onto Russia and China’s expanding and consensual roles in global power consolidation before reviewing how the impending currency reset levers power away from the Anglo-American empire (the last empire) towards an ostensible ‘multi-lateral system’ which, as it turns out, is the penultimate phase of New World Order consolidation.

Some related essays are included from ‘the last great financial crisis of 2008’ era just to stir the pot further.

I thank Carlo Parcelli too for penning a very thoughtful introduction which I’m including here:

His wretched anti-Semitism and pro-Fascist sympathies aside, there can be little doubt that Pound was not wrong about the deleterious effects of usury, its ability to create wealth without commensurate production. Besides, as Norman Ball points out in this short but extraordinarily ambitious volume, the kind of production that would be required to de facto reduce derivatives debt alone would in turn accelerate global ecological devastation. Thus prudent prescriptions at this late stage would precipitate an apocalyptic tailspin far swifter than today’s slide toward a secular end-times.

The moral and religious condemnations of usury aside, Mr. Ball’s book is no theological screed. No matter how dark, ‘East-West Dialectics’ is a sober appraisal of the current state of the world economy and the institutions that run it by one who is thoroughly versed in its many facets. There’s no evocation of Christ among the money changers here. Facet by facet and with great concision, Ball convincingly argues that the world economy is coming apart at the seams and that the planet’s long history of usury, creating wealth from nothing, is the culprit.

In the first part of ‘East-West Dialectics’, Mr. Ball clearly lays out the connection between ‘usury’ and the collateral damage of population and planetary dissolution. In the latter part of the book’s first section and into the second and third sections , Mr. Ball deftly moves from the eschatological dimension of ‘usury’ to international jockeying between the US and Britain, Russia and China over which nation-state, or multipolar confluence, will wear the ultimate garland of ‘Destroyer of Worlds’. He writes convincingly that the US as unipolar power has already exported itself out of contention, and is in all likelihood, the last empire on the way to the fabled New World Order.

Mr. Ball’s writing even about a subject as dry as world economics is vibrant, often brilliant and occasionally dazzling. He brings wit and Swiftian irony to a very grim and difficult topic. All this plus a profound and convincing argument for why we are faced with a modern secular end-times in the age that promised to be a scientific/technological Utopia.